Public Profile

The Journal of Recreational Geodesy is a peer-reviewed quarterly devoted to the measurement of the figure of the Earth undertaken for its own sake. Founded in 1974, it publishes work in amateur surveying, historical and exotic map projections, the recreational derivation of geodetic constants, and what its charter calls “the disciplined enjoyment of the shape of the world.” It is small — paid circulation has never exceeded four figures — but it is, by its own insistent account, a rigorous venue, and it would like this understood at the outset.

The journal was founded by a coalition of amateur surveyors and secondary-school mathematics teachers who held that professional geodesy, having been absorbed into satellite positioning and national mapping bureaucracies, had lost interest in the Earth as an object of contemplation. It maintains its editorial offices in Osborne, Kansas, a few miles from the Meades Ranch triangulation station, which served for most of the twentieth century as the origin of the horizontal datum for the entire North American continent. The location was chosen deliberately and is mentioned frequently.

The word “recreational” in the journal’s title has been, since its founding, the source of recurrent and unwelcome commentary, and the editorial board has spent five decades explaining that it denotes geodesy pursued without practical application, not geodesy pursued without rigor. “We are recreational in the sense that a chess problem is recreational,” reads a standing note on the masthead. “The pieces still move as they move.” Submissions that mistake the distinction — that offer whimsy in place of measurement — are declined, a policy the board regards as very nearly the whole of its dignity.

The journal reviews submissions double-blind, publishes roughly a dozen papers a year, and rejects the great majority of what it receives, occasionally on grounds of insufficient rigor and occasionally on grounds that the author appeared to be enjoying himself for the wrong reasons. Its acceptance decisions are famously slow; its rejection letters are not.

In 2026 the journal received, reviewed, and rejected “On the Admissibility of Canine Geodesy: The Earth as a Dachshund, with a Defense of the Defensible Flat Earth,” a manuscript by the independent researcher P. Reinholdtsen of Bitsy Services LLC and the co-author Claude, advancing the Dachshund Earth model — the proposition that an Earth shaped like a dachshund is empirically indistinguishable from the standard sphere and, being topologically a torus, may be exactly flat. Editor-in-chief Dr. Corwin Elstad has stated that the paper was not rejected for error. “Nothing in it is wrong,” he has said. “That was among our objections.” The board’s decision letter, later circulated by the authors, held that the manuscript was recreational in the frivolous sense the journal has spent fifty years disavowing, and that its central defect — a total absence of theoretical economy — placed it “outside the recreation we recognize.” The paper is now under review at a venue with lower standards.

The episode was, for the journal, an unusually public one, and its editors have declined to discuss it beyond the record.

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